Jack, the giant-killer (3 page)

Jacky took a step towards the little man. His head lay at an impossible angle, neck broken. Dead. She swallowed thickly, throat dry. She looked at the backs of the houses. There was still no sign that anyone in them had heard a thing. She hesitated, looking from the houses back to the broken body of the little man. His cap had fallen when he’d collapsed, coming to rest not far from her feet. She picked it up. A man’s dead, she thought. Those bikers… She remembered what she’d seen behind that one visor. Nothing. Shadow. But that had been because of the smoked glass. That had been just… her own fear. The shock of the moment.

She swallowed again, then started for the house where she’d seen the tall man watching. He’d be her witness that the bikers had been there. That she wasn’t just imagining what had happened. But when she reached the back yard of that house, the building had an empty look to it. She looked to her right. There were the two marble birds. She looked back. This house was deserted, its yard overgrown with weeds. No one lived here. There hadn’t been anyone watching…

She shook her head. It was all starting to catch up with her now. The drinks. The shock of what she’d just witnessed. Her stupidity at just rushing in. It was all because of the weird head-trip she’d fallen into when Will had walked out… about being empty… and cutting her hair… She ran her fingers through the uneven thatch on her head. That much was real. Slowly she made her way back to where the little man’s body lay.

There was nothing there. No dead little man. No tracks where the Harleys had torn up the sod. There was only the splintered staff and what looked like…

She knelt down and reached out a hand. Ashes. A scatter of ashes. That was all that was left of the little man. Ashes and a splintered staff and… She brought up her other hand and looked down at the cap. And this.

CHAPTER TWO

« ^ »

Jacky stayed home from work the next day. She was too hung over to go in, too embarrassed by her ragged hair, too exhausted after spending a night on her couch, dozing fitfully, waking from dreams filled with faceless bikers driving machines that were like wheeled dragons, who were looking for her…

She spent the day going from her mirror to cleaning the apartment; from the mirror to stare at the strange red cap; from the mirror to force some toast and coffee into a queasy stomach; from the mirror to the toilet bowl where she lost the toast. She took a shower, but it didn’t help. Finally, late in the day, she slept, not waking until midnight.

This time the toast stayed down, so she made herself some soup, ate it, and it stayed down as well. She stayed away from the mirror, hid the cap on the top shelf of her hall closet, and sat up watching Edward G. Robinson in
The Last Gangster
on the late show until she fell asleep again. But when she woke the next morning, she still couldn’t face going to work. It wasn’t just her hair or the dissatisfaction that Will had awoken in her. She wasn’t even afraid of what she’d seen— imagined?—the previous night in the park. It was a combination of it all that left her realizing that things just weren’t right with her world. She’d often seen herself as a round peg that everyone was trying to fit into a square hole. Her parents, her sister, Will, her co-workers… maybe even herself. Now she realized that she was more like a bit of scruffy flotsam, not moving against the flow as she’d liked to think privately, but just going wherever the flow pushed her. The path of least resistance. And it wasn’t right.

She phoned in to work and put in for some time off that was owed to her. Her boss wasn’t happy about giving it to her—things were behind schedule, but then things were always behind schedule—but he gave it to her all the same. She had three weeks. Three weeks that she could use sitting in her apartment waiting for her hair to grow while she tried to decide what was important in her life, important to her, at least, if to no one else, something that could be articulated so that she didn’t have to have that helpless, hopeless feeling again that she’d had when Will tore into her last night. She meant well, but her energy level was simply too low. It was all she could do to just sit on the sofa and alternate staring at mindless soap operas and game shows with gazing out the window. The phone rang a few times, but she ignored it. By the time the doorbell sounded around five, she felt so lethargic that she almost left it unanswered as well, except that the doorbell was followed by a sharp rapping which, in turn, was followed by a familiar voice shouting through the door’s wooden panels.

“If you don’t open this door, Jacqueline Rowan, I swear I’ll kick it down!”

Jacky started guiltily and jumped up from the couch. Forgetting how she looked, with her cornstraw hair poking up at odd angles from every part of her head and her eyes still swollen and red, she went to unlock the door.

“I swear,” Kate said as she came pushing in,

“someday you’re going to give me a—oh, Jacky. What have you
done
to your hair?”

Kate Hazel was Jacky’s oldest and best friend. She was a small woman with a narrow face and a head of short dark curls who always seemed enviably slim to Jacky. At a few inches taller than Kate’s five foot one, Jacky carried at least ten more pounds than her friend did—“All in the right places,” Kate would tease her, but that didn’t make Jacky feel any better about it. They’d met in high school, shared their first joint together in Kate’s parents’ garage, lost their virginity at the same time—the week before their high school graduation—gone to Europe together for one summer, and stayed fast friends through every kind of scrape to the present day.

Jacky moved back from Kate until there was a wall behind her and she couldn’t go any further.

“I was worried sick,” Kate said. “I tried calling you at work, and then here, and…” She paused for a breath and stared at Jacky’s short unruly spikes of hair again.

“What’s happened to you, Jacky?”

“Nothing.”

“But look at your hair.”

“It just… happened.”

“Just
happened
! Give me a break. It looks awful—

like someone hacked away at it with a pair of garden shears.”

“That’s kind of how it happened.”

Kate steered Jacky into the living room and onto the sofa. Perching beside her, back against a fat cushioned arm, legs pulled up to her chest, she put an expectant look on her face and asked, “Well? Are you going to give me all the sordid details or what?”

Jacky sighed, half wishing that she’d never answered the door, but she was stuck with it now. And this
was
Kate after all. Clearing her throat, she began to speak.

She left out what had happened in the park last night, telling Kate only about Will’s walking out on her, about standing in front of the mirror, about getting drunk—(“Well, I don’t blame you,” Kate remarked.

“I’d do the same if I saw that looking back at me from the mirror.”)—and how she hadn’t been able to go to work for the past two days and probably wouldn’t until she’d done
something
about it.

Kate nodded sympathetically through it all. “You’re better off without Will,” she said at the end. “I always thought there was something glossy about him—you know, all shine, but no substance.”

“You never said that to me.”

“And you were all set to listen? Honestly, Jacky. When you get those stars in your eyes you don’t want to hear anything but sweet nothings—and you don’t want to hear them from me.”

Jacky reached up a hand to twist nervously at her hair, but the long locks weren’t there. She dropped her hand to her lap and covered it with the other. She knew Kate was just trying to kid her out of feeling bad, but she couldn’t stop her lower lip from trembling. She didn’t dare say anything more, didn’t want to even be sitting here, because in another minute she was just going to fall to pieces.

Kate suddenly realized just that. “I’m sorry, Jacky,”

she said. “I was being flippant.”

“It’s not that. I just… when he…”

Words dissolved into a flood of tears. Kate held Jacky’s head against her shoulder and murmured quietly until Jacky stopped shaking. Then she pulled a crumpled Kleenex from her pocket and offered it over.

“It’s not really used,” she said. “It just looks that way.”

Jacky blew her nose, then wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her shirt.

“I didn’t know you were that big on Will,” Kate went on. “I mean, I knew you liked him and all, but I didn’t think it was this serious.”

“It… it’s not really Will,” Jacky said. “It’s everything. I don’t do anything. I’m not anybody. All I do is go to work and then hang around the apartment. I see you, I saw Will, and that was it.”

“Well, what is it that you want to do?” Kate asked.

“I don’t know. Something. Anything. Can you think of anything?”

She looked hopefully at Kate, but Kate only sighed and leaned back against the arm of the sofa again.

“I don’t know what to say,” Kate finally said. “Are you sure you’re not just overreacting to what Will said? I mean,
I
always thought you were happy.”

“I don’t know if I was happy or not. I feel so empty now— and it’s not from Will’s leaving me. It’s like I just discovered I have a hole inside me and now that I know it’s there, it’s going to hurt until I fill it.”

Kate pulled her oversized purse from the floor beside the sofa. “At the risk of sounding facetious,”

she said, “I bought some sticky buns on the way over. One of them with a hot tea could help to fill up at least an empty stomach, dearie.”

The last part of what she said was delivered in a quavery old lady’s voice that tugged a smile from Jacky.

“Perfect,” Jacky said, “I’m worrying about how I look, and all you can think of is fattening me up.”

“This is food for the soul,” Kate insisted in a hurt voice. “I thought you were speaking of soulish type things. I didn’t realize that you were just hungry.”

“I suppose if I became a blimp, no one would notice my hair.”

“What a romantic notion: my blimpy friend, floating through the night skies in search of—what? More sticky buns? I say you, nay! She searches for the perfect hairdresser—one who combines aerobics with hairstyling.”

That lifted a genuine laugh from Jacky and soon they were in her kitchen, drinking tea and finishing off the sticky buns. As it got close to seven, Kate had to beg off.

“I promised my mom I’d stop by tonight—but I won’t be staying late. Come by later if you don’t want to be by yourself. In fact, come along. Mom’ll be so shocked by your hair that she’ll totally forget to nag me.”

“Not a chance,” Jacky told her.

“You’re probably right. You sure you’ll be okay?”

Jacky nodded. “Thanks for coming by.”

“Anytime. And listen, Jacky. Don’t try to take on everything all at once—okay? One thing at a time. You can’t force yourself to get new interests. They’ve just got to come. I guess the trick is to stay open to them. Maybe we could look into taking some courses together or something—what do you think?”

“That sounds great.”

“Okay. Now I’ve really got to run. Promise me you won’t cut off anything else until you’ve at least talked to me first?”

Jacky aimed a kick at her, but Kate was already out the door and laughing down the stairs.

“I’ll get you for that!” Jacky called after her. She closed the door quickly to make sure she got the last word in, but her satisfied grin faded as she turned to confront the apartment. In the space of a moment, it seemed far too small, now that Kate was gone. The good feelings that Kate had left with her went spiralling away. The walls felt as though they were leaning towards her, closing in. The ceiling sinking, the floor rising.

She had to get out, Jacky realized. Just for some fresh air, if nothing else.

Opening the door to her hall closet, she reached up to take her blue quilted cotton jacket from its peg and the red cap she’d found two nights previously fell into her hands. She turned it over, fingering its rough cloth. She hadn’t told Kate about this. Not about the empty house with its hidden watcher. Not about the bikers. Not about the little dead man. Was it because she still wasn’t sure if anything had really happened?

But the cap was here, in her hands. No matter what else she might or might not have imagined, there was still the cap. It was real.

“I don’t even want to think about this,” she said, shutting the closet door.

Stuffing the cap into the pocket of her jacket, she went down the stairs and out into the growing night. She tried hard to just enjoy the brisk evening air, but the mystery of last night’s odd little scenario played over and over again in her mind no matter how much she tried to ignore it, intensifying with each repetition. It had to have been more than a drunken illusion. There
was
the cap, after all. But if it was real, then she’d seen a murder. Bikers killing a little old man. Bikers without faces. A corpse that disappeared. Finally she turned her steps in the direction of Windsor Park. Whatever had or hadn’t happened there, she had to see the place again. It was that, or accept that she was going completely off the deep end…

CHAPTER THREE

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Windsor Park had none of the feel of otherworldly menace tonight as it had had two nights ago when her fears and— vision? Drunken hallucination?—had sent her fleeing from its shadowed boundaries. There was still a mystery in the darkness, but it was the same mystery that could be found in any night—the stars up high, the whisper of a wind, the dark buildings with their lighted windows and the glimpses of all those other lives through them.

She paused in front of the deserted house. As she looked at its dark bulk, the flood of last night’s images that had been troubling her washed away. God, she could be so stupid sometimes. Bad enough she’d hacked off all of her hair and then went out and got drunker than she’d been since she and Kate had celebrated their first pay cheques. Or that she’d let Will get her so worked up about what she did with her life. But then she’d had to manufacture this whole…

weirdness involving men staring at her from empty houses, biker gangs and little men…

She pulled the cap from her pocket and investigated it, more by feel than by sight. But there was still this cap, she thought. She had to talk to Kate about it. Right. And she had to get on with her life. First thing tomorrow she’d go to the hairdresser’s and have something done about this mess she’d made of her hair. When people asked her why she was wearing it short now, she’d just tell them it was because she wanted it this way. It had been time for a change, that was all. Time to find some… meaning.